Meeting Notes: 9/24/2018

Tonight's class was entitled "Defensive Practice (Disruptions & Surviving the "Dump")". As the title suggests this training session was completely focused on how to disrupt your enemy's spells and then how to properly survive through a flurry of spell combos. We are developing the foundation at this point.

Disrupting Spells

At the core, any spell cast that disrupts another caster's spell gets the job done.

It is best to use lower circle spells for intentionally disrupting. Suggested spells are:

Weaken

Clumsy

Feeblemind

Magic Arrow

Harm

The intent of disruption is not to cause damage, but rather to prevent the attacker from completing the spell cast. This will buy you time to either heal yourself, get away, or counter and disrupt the opponents' timing and begin your offensive assault. If damage is done while disrupting, consider it a bonus!

Lower levels spells are used for disruption simply due to the low mana cost and speed in which they can be cast. For example Explosion takes 2 seconds to cast whereas Feeblemind can be cast in .75 seconds,

The moment you see your opponent cast a spell you can counter with a low circle spell and so long as your reaction time is good you will be able to cast and disrupt their spell. Note that Last Target hotkey and Que Last Target/Target Self should be used to cast spells as fast as possible.

Practice with a partner with one casting offensive spells and the other attempting to time disruptions, then swap roles

Surviving The Dump

Mage PvP is all about mana management and timing. In order to manage your mana you must know when the time to cast, what to cast, and when not to cast just yet. At your disposal you have two heal spells "Heal" and "Greater Heal". Heal takes .75 seconds to cast and heals Magery * .1 + 1d6 (1d6 refers to the board style games using dice where 1d6 would be a 6 sided dice. This formula means that at GM Magery you will heal anywhere from 11-16 points of damage. Heal costs 4 mana to cast. Greater Heal takes 1.5 seconds to cast and costs 11 mana. The formula for Greater Heal is (Magery * .4) + 1d10 so you can heal a range between 41-50 points of damage. Greater heal can be disrupted, Heal cannot.

Deciding between Heal or Greater Heal boils down to how heavy under fire you and how good your timing is. Spamming lesser heal may keep you alive while not taxing your mana supply but done all the time will result in burning through reagents quickly and will not always heal enough to overcome dying.

Greater Heal needs to be timed correctly for maximum effect. For example if you see the famous Explosion/Energy Bolt combo coming then you would want to hold the Greater Heal spell until both spells has done their damage to maximize heal points per mana cost. Obviously if you are low on health it would not be prudent to wait until both spells hit unless your prefer life in grey.

Note on Spell Timing

Do not by fooled by the animations of spells as they will lead you astray. It is not the animation of the spell but rather the damage from the spell that causes the disruption. The lightning spell has a long 1 second delay from when it is cast to when the damage is applied. Every spell has a delay from the animation of the cast to when damage is applied, spells may vary in delays so you should practice on yourself and note these delays. You should notice the damage number when the spell "actually" hits, if holding for a Greater Heal or waiting to cast your spell you must learn the timing of this damage. If you case Greater Heal after seeing lightning cast on you, the damage will be applied half way through your cast and will disrupt you.

You should practice timing of spell combos on yourself like Explosion/Energy Bolt or other damage spells

More to come in the next training as we focus on these basics and using them to turn the tides and go from defensive to offensive quickly. Consider this an intro in to defense as we will add potions and wands in future training.